Judging from some linguists’ reaction the claim seems doubtful, but I pulled this from the ashes.

Hear Not

Mother,
What is this?
     Bark.
     Fire.

Old man,
What is this?
     Fire.
     Flow.

Mother,
What is this?
     Black.
     Ashes.

Old man,
Who gives fire?
     Old man.
     Mother.

Mother,
Who am I?
     Hand.
     Fire.
     Ashes.

Happy anniversary, WWW.

Meiecundimees üks Korsakov läks eile Lätti [via Dr Buckles].

How The Inbetweeners was created.

SF author John Crowley on The Next Future.

Darth Baby’s Lightsaber.

Thumbs and Ammo.

These boots were made for tramping: Steve Bell, Mark Steel and Russell Brand on Thatcher’s death.

The Helsinki Bus Station Theory.

Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?

Answers in Genesis on “the” Ice Age. Noah built the Ark before tools were invented—praise be!

Paul Krugman on the economics of baby-sitting.

Stewart Lee on why right-wing stand-ups get left on the shelf.

News is bad for you.

And for the last time (for now), it’s Brian Butterfield’s Ultra-Pill, Sporting Look-Similar-Tos, Buttertendo and Football Boot.

I would add links about the Boston Marathon bombing and that fertilizer explosion in Texas, but it’s all too depressing. See also: complete failure to mention Sandy Hook here last year.

Twenty-three metres of it, to be exact. Buying and priming and painting and fitting all of that took a while. Then there was the gloss painting of handrails and railings, painting of staircase walls, and other extended DIY that only fitted around work and family life with difficulty, all compressed into as few weeks as possible so that we could host two rounds of family visitors in the guest beds in our new upstairs room. Lots of late nights and lost weekends.

Meanwhile, our new attic windows were giving us unexpected views of the Pentlands, unexpectedly looking like this for an unexpectedly long time:

My parents came to visit for the Easter school holidays, and at the end of their stay I travelled with them for a few days to their next port of call, which I’ll try to write about soon. This past weekend I took W. down to London to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace (given that he is Now Six), and next week I’ll be away again briefly for work. As usual, finding time to write here at the sort of length I used to is impossible, so I’m sort of writing here instead.

We took the kids to Stirling Castle yesterday, and got snowed on while we were there. In Edinburgh today it's still all white outside—the latest snow of the season since we moved here.

How long will it last?

How to save wet books.

How Britain got a taste for horsemeat.

How “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” ruled the Internet.

How the Harlem Shake went global.

Folklore and the vernacular Web.

The impossibility of auto-censoring chat.

The dangers of random permutations.

The dangers of graphical tricksiness.

Douglas Rushkoff: Why I’m quitting Facebook.

No comment.

Call Me a Hole: best mashup since “A Stroke of Genie-us”.

You Can’t Be My Girl.

200 great Brazilian albums.

Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein.

Charlie Brooker on “Be Right Back” and Black Mirror.

It’s Brian Butterfield’s Sports Restaurant and Collector Cards!

How the people of Timbuktu saved their ancient manuscripts.

The last House on Holland Island [via Jim Kazanjian].

The flexible paper sculptures of Li Hongbo.

Adam Curtis interviewed at Vice.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Not Butterfield: Brian’s Sleep Therapy, Gymnasium and Luxury Sportswear.

My favourite viral video in ages [here in an edited version] turned out to be staged [qui in italiano], but who cares? Via Mefi.

How the author of Seduction of the Innocent faked his data and killed an industry.

Nukemap reveals exactly how many kilotons dropped on your CBD would obliterate your house.

How Adobe endlessly rebuilds Photoshop.

In case you’re wondering how there were so many good videos of that meteor in the Urals: Russian roads from a dashcam’s point of view.

The absurd luck of famous men.

“Tubular Bells made me a million but the tax bill came to £860,000.”

It takes planning and caution to avoid being “it”.

Institutionalising serendipity via productive coffee breaks.

Edge.org asks “ what should we be worried about?” (conveniently framing the question to ignore climate change). I’m worried about when I’ll find time to read all 120,000 words.

Retailers can now track you across the mall.

It’s now a crime in the US to unlock your smartphone.

More Brian: The Butterfield Spa and the Butterfield Bootcamp Fitness Deh-Veh-Deh.

The Russian family who missed World War II.

A bird ballet.

First time buyers are getting younger in the UK, but the reasons aren’t good news.

Stories of European migrants fleeing the recession.

Distraction of the [Fri-]day is this great Mercator Puzzle. More fun with the Mercator Projection.

The power of the network: a YouTube video brings two men together from opposite ends of the earth to spend three days in a home workshop and make fingers for a boy born without them. [More, via Mefi.]

]]> 2013-02-04T13:55:04+00:00 http://speedysnail.com/2013/01/backup_tennis_racket_string.html Brian Butterfield is back with Martial Arts and his Sports Warehouse. The Office: An Unexpected Journey. Bad Kids’ Jokes. That’s the spirit. Impressive sleight of hand at the 2012 Beijing International Magic Convention. John Quijada and the language he invented.... backup_tennis_racket_string@http://speedysnail.com/ Brian Butterfield is back with Martial Arts and his Sports Warehouse.

The Office: An Unexpected Journey.

Bad Kids’ Jokes.

That’s the spirit.

Impressive sleight of hand at the 2012 Beijing International Magic Convention.

John Quijada and the language he invented.

Touché promises Minority Report-style interaction with technology and... anything.

The rise and fall of HMV by an advertising exec who worked on its account for many years.

“I’ve been in the country for 18 hours and I’m already tired of cured pork.”

Newly discovered chameleons that fit on the head of a match.

Tasmania’s bushfire devastation from above (impressively stabilized at YouTube).

On Friday the fourth of January, my hometown of Hobart in Tasmania reached a record temperature of 41.8°C, and the state experienced its worst bushfires since the year before I was born. It was the start of a week of fires around Australia, as a heatwave in the centre recoloured temperature maps and sent blasts of scorching air to different parts of the country in turn.

On that Friday morning, my parents drove my brother and his family up to Hobart airport from their home near Nubeena on the Tasman Peninsula, not thinking much of the small fire they spotted along the way. By lunchtime, after they’d done their weekly supermarket shop, the road back home was closed by what had turned into a raging fire that destroyed hundreds of homes, particularly in the small town of Dunalley right on the highway.

On the other side of the world, I had picked up news of the fires on Twitter and was worried that my folks were stuck on the peninsula, not knowing they were stranded on the other side of the roadblock. I heard they were safe from my brother when he was back in Sydney, but the worry then was that they had nothing with them—certainly not the valuables you’d rescue when preparing to flee a fire, like passports and back-up drives. And there was another fire burning on the other side of the hill behind their house, with no fire service vehicles nearby.

For a few tense days, I watched the Tasmanian Fire Service bushfire page closely, as the Stormlea Road fire near their house went to a “Watch and Act” rating one step short of an outright emergency. Mum and Dad had been put up by my sister-in-law’s family, but had no idea when they would get home, or if it would even be there when they did.

In the end it was over a week before the road to the peninsula was reopened to residents. Their home was untouched, and the fire near it is now contained, although still burning. Their neighbour said that the people left in their area had to evacuate to the beach three times during the worst days, when it looked like the fire was breaking out.

Scary stuff, and it’s not over yet; after a cooler week, temperatures are rising again in Tasmania, and other communities are under threat.

Still, my parents have had a lucky escape for now, especially compared to some of their neighbours in the region. The worst they suffered (beyond the anxiety of that week) was a freezer full of rotten meat after eight days without power.

I have a couple of photo galleries of the Tasman Peninsula on this site, and found myself looking over them while my head was full of it all. It’s a beautiful part of the state. And that prompted me to dig out the photos from our last visit three years ago and turn the best of those into a gallery too. Here it is:

None of these locations has been affected by the fires as far as I can tell, although they’ve gone close to Eaglehawk Neck and the Tesselated Pavement. There are photos of some affected places in the earlier galleries, though, like Taranna and Dunalley.

I just read that the road to Fortescue Bay has been closed by the ongoing fires; I hope that doesn’t bode badly. I didn’t include it in the gallery above, but here’s Fortescue in less fraught times:

Not well. I got halfway. 50,446 words. It was just too difficult to keep up the momentum in the face of all the other stuff going on at work and home.

Meanwhile, I cleaned up 1,000 spam comments, for a spam-to-real-comments ratio of 66.666:1. Partly because of this discouraging statistic, I’m switching comments off this year. Sorry to those few who might otherwise have chipped in; maybe I’ll switch them on temporarily now and then. This post by another blogger shutting down his comments is a good account of how things have changed in that department over the years.

So much for new year’s resolutions. This year I made none, but intend to stick around here, one way or another. I won’t be counting words, though.